DePaul law professor Terry Smith, the author of the forthcoming “Barack Obama, Post-Racialism and the New Politics of Triangulation,” writes:

Among other race-baiting, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has referred to the nation’s first African American president as a “food stamp president,” and someone who engages in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” a coarse reference to President Obama's African father and a nod to “birtherism.”

Not content merely to demean the president, Gingrich has said that poor black children lack role models and a work ethic - a broadside against millions of black, working-poor parents who each day serve as shepherds for their children and instill in them work and other ethics.

Yet the only person who has responded more passively to the former speaker’s racialism than his Republican rivals has been President Obama himself. The irony of having a black man in the White House is that he is disarmed from responding to white opponents who flirt with a revivification of the Republican Party’s Southern strategy. Indeed, Obama has been disarmed, or has unilaterally disarmed himself, from sustained engagement with questions of race during his first term.

The concern on Obama’s part appears to be that middle-of-the-road white voters will not tolerate a black politician focusing on race, even if his purpose is to upbraid someone like Gingrich for making racially inflammatory comments. This concern is not unfounded, yet in succumbing to political reality, Obama has simply reinforced a different iteration of white racial intolerance.